Holy Alliance Research Articles

Mark Mazower. Governing the World. The History of an Idea

Mark Mazower provides us with a very readable and highly stimulating intellectual history of Western starting with the Vienna Congress in 1815 and ending in 2012 with the ongoing Syrian civil war. The historical analysis focuses not only on the philosophical and political currents at the heart of 19th and 20th century but also on how Anglo-Saxon politicians and high ranking civil servants viewed and shaped international institutions during these two centuries; all of this is full of interesting biographical findings, illustrative contemporary quotations, and insightful historical judgement. The book falls into two parts. The first part is on the Era of Internationalism and covers developments from 1815 until 1939; the second part is entitled Governing the World the American Way and deals mainly with the UN in the post-World War II era until today. Mazower traces four influential currents of internationalism in the 19th century, which are all four portrayed as intellectual and political movements arising as a counter-reaction to the holy alliance of European great powers and the associated restorative anti-liberal policies orchestrated by Metternich: Mazzini's Young Europe nationalism, Richard Cobden's free trade ideology, Marx and organized socialism, and, even though politically less influential, the Anglo-American peace movement. All of these currents are presented by Mazower through short biographical portraits of their inventors who - in the case of Mazzini and Marx as emigres - lived in London in the mid-19th century. Particularly rewarding is the description of the often tension-filled biographical and intellectual links between them. In one of the last chapters of the first part of the book Mazower introduces international law and science as a 19th century semantics of internationalism. His main focus in the chapter on international law is on the founders of the Institut de Droit International and on the rise

Von der Anerkennungspraxis der Habsburgermonarchie gegenüber den südamerikanischen Staaten im 19. Jahrhundert

In the beginning of the 19th century, when the Latin and South American former colonies started their struggle for independence, the European world all of the sudden found itself in the very delicate situation, having to decide how to legally deal with new up-raising entities, which were in fact already independent states but officially still part of the mother land. The European position on the „South American issue“ – as it was called – had from 1815 on been subject to many conferences hosted by the powers of the Holy Alliance. Between 1815 and 1823, for which period the Germans have invented the term „Kongressdiplomatie“, it became clear that there was no such thing as an European position on the „South American issue“ and that the Holy Alliances` attitude towards South America could not have been more diverse: While Great Britain and France, in their capacity of colonial and imperial powers acted in favour of the recognition of the newly established independent states, Austria, Russia and Prussia officially opposed to the recognition of states, which had been craeted as a result of a revolution. Consequently, Brazil, the only monarchy in South America by that time, remained the one and only South American state officially recognised as a sovereign and independent country by Austria up to the year 1842.

Tourisme de luxe et gastronomie de luxe : une nouvelle Sainte Alliance sur fond de patrimoines ?

Cet article s’intéresse aux liens existant entre tourisme de luxe et gastronomie de luxe. Bien qu’ils aient constitué une source appréciable de devises, l’étude de ces secteurs a été progressivement délaissée au profit de celle de la gastronomie populaire et du tourisme de masse héritier des congés payés. Cependant, l’émergence économique de nouveaux pays, l’avènement consécutif d’une classe mondialisée de ménages riches, la recherche d’utilités hédonistes et l’affirmation d’un droit au luxe, tendent à élargir la clientèle du luxe. Les offreurs se saisissent de cette opportunité pour intégrer prestations touristiques de luxe et prestations gastronomiques de luxe au sein de nouveaux univers, sur la base de leurs patrimoines privés de marques et des patrimoines collectifs que constituent les patrimoines gastronomiques et touristiques.

Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin: honor in international relations

1. Introduction Part I. Theory: 2. Honor in international relations 3. The Russian state and its honor 4. Russia's relations with the West Part II. Honor and Cooperation: 5. The Holy Alliance, 1815-53 6. The Triple Entente, 1907-17 7. The collective security, 1933-9 8. The war with terrorism, 2001-5 Part III. Honor and Defensiveness: 9. The Recueillement, 1856-71 10. The peaceful coexistence, 1921-39 11. Containing NATO expansion, 1995-2000 Part IV. Honor and Assertiveness: 12. The Crimean War, 1853-6 13. The early Cold War, 1946-9 14. The Russia-Georgia War, August 2008 15. Conclusion Bibliography.

The Result of A Holy Alliance: Debus and Tariqah in Banten Province

In this paper, the writer describes the practice of debus in Banten and its function among present-day Bantenese.The underlying question to be considered here is the way in which debus perfor-mances are now regarded as an integral part of Banten’s tradition. There is anumber of studies devoted to debus in Banten and in several places in Indonesia,most of which are anthropological studies. Little attention has been given to an in-depth study of debus practised by the Bantenese. In fact, debus has developedas invulnerability performance and has gone much further of late than the previous invulnerability performances in Aceh described by Snouck at the end of the nineteenth century. The writer attempts to show how the debus perfor-mances combined with aspects of tariqah’ now also include several new attributes

Mafia links between the Balkans and Scandinavia. State of affairs

The last twenty years has seen an increasing presence of Balkan organized crime groups in security reports and newspapers’ headlines. This does not mean that mafia groups did not exist during Socialist Yugoslavia – even if its collapse and the following war made criminals and smugglers useful for politicians and leaders to maintain their power; it rather means that Balkan organized crime came outside its traditional areas of action in Serbia, Montenegro and Albania: less territorial and nationalist than it was before, it is now gaining prominence in an international scenario, making agreements with Italian and South American mafias – the so-called Holy Alliance – to manage drug routes towards Western Europe. One of the most interesting factors concerning Balkan mafia groups today is their presence in countries which traditionally do not have a history of organized crime, such as the Scandinavian states. One of the reasons lies in the wide percentage of immigrants moving from Balkan countries to Sweden or Norway. Since the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, war-crimes fugitives were able to become common criminals in these countries, such as the infamous Želiko Raznjatović (“Arkan”). However, year by year, these gangs grew larger, taking advantage of the “expertise” and the resources gained during the war. In particular, the most spectacular case – the Våstberga helicopter robbery in 2009 – showed how these groups operate with military-style precision, utilize a wide number of participants, and have at their disposal laerge amounts of weapons and money. This paper will draw on the importance of Scandinavian – Balkan mafia relations in relation to three main criminal areas: drug and weapon smuggling and human trafficking, in order to underline the role of diasporas in enforcing organized crime groups and the extent to which these mafias could be a threat for the stability in both Eastern and Western Europe.

"America for the Americans": Revisiting Monroe's Message

"America for the Americans":Revisiting Monroe's Message Monica Henry (bio) Jay Sexton . The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 290 pp. Map, notes, suggestions for further reading, and index. $27.00. Since George F. Tucker's full account of the Monroe Doctrine in 1885, U.S. historians have provided, on a fairly regular basis, varying interpretations of President James Monroe's 1823 message to Congress. Between 1900 and 1930, as the United States intervened repeatedly in the Caribbean and Central America, most of them agreed that the drafters of the message had meant an active U.S. policy to drive European powers away from meddling in the Western Hemisphere. Hiram Bingham, however, in his provocative book The Monroe Doctrine: An Obsolete Shibboleth (1913), cared to differ, as he claimed that the United States had outgrown the Doctrine and thus should refrain from intervention. In the 1930s, Dexter Perkins, the founding scholar—and still the leading authority for some—of the history of the Monroe Doctrine, also believed that U.S. imperial thrust in Latin America had not been a motivation for the originators of the Doctrine. Upsetting the status quo in Cuba, a Spanish colony and major U.S. trading partner, would have been detrimental to U.S. commercial interests in the Caribbean. That the Doctrine had been transformed into an instrument for intervention in later years was no fault of the Monroe administration, Perkins pointed out. But most importantly, Perkins brought his thorough research of European archives into the historiographical discussion. He concluded that the European threat—the Russian expansion in the Northwest and the attempt of the Holy Alliance to restore the Spanish former colonies—was not real. Hence the prevailing myth that Monroe's message had shielded Latin America from European despotism was inaccurate. Soon after, Edward Tatum broke away from the Holy Alliance-menace argument. In United States and Europe, 1815-1823 (1936), he made a case of the serious danger Great Britain had posed to her former colonies. It was a realistic assumption at the time of the drafting of the message that Britain could indeed upend U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. Then during World War II, Walter Lippmann turned the argument around. He strongly suggested that [End Page 243] the Doctrine had been an attempt to protect U.S. security by relying on the British fleet to resist European interference, thus brushing aside the idea that it had been an effort to stake out a U.S. empire. The "agreement with the British" assertion was taken up by the diplomatic historians of the 1940s. Arthur P. Whitaker contended that the U.S. unilateral declaration was not primarily to challenge the former colonial power, even though the administration was certainly suspicious of it; rather it was to warn against a joint venture with Great Britain, considered to be a part of the European system.1 Another major shift in the debate took place in the 1970s. In The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (1975), Ernest May argued that the foreign policy factors had not counted in the decision for the message. In fact, domestic considerations—notably the 1824 presidential elections—explained why Secretary of State John Quincy Adams upheld a unilateralist policy, whereas Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford and Secretary of War John Calhoun favored Britain's offer of a joint declaration. Because anti-British feeling ran strong among the U.S. electorate, a U.S.-Great Britain alliance would have hurt Adams' presidential candidacy. Hence Crawford and Calhoun, candidates as well, promoted the coalition, fully aware that Adams would be blamed for it. Today May's singular interpretation still stands alone, yet it should be credited for having introduced home issues into the discussion. Indeed, Cold War revisionists emphasized that domestic pressure for the U.S. capitalist economy to expand overseas had driven the Monroe administration to issue the 1823 declaration. It was a warning to rival empires to steer away from the budding U.S. empire. So where does The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America come in this major historiographical debate—which the author strangely overlooks...

Dmitry Bludov -Diplomat, Literary Man and Statesman

On the beginning of state activities of D.N. Bludov, who is well known as one of initiators of the of the literary society - Arzamas creation and as a distinguished representative of Russian enlightened bureaucracy - Minister of Justice and Minister of Internal Affairs. His role in making and translating important international documents, which were the basis of The Holy Alliance and international relations in Europe after the victory over Napoleon France remain unexplored. That is why the main attention in the article is paid to diplomacy period in life of Bludov, which corresponds his main literary period.

TARLE'S ‘THE NEXT TASK’: AN INTRODUCTION AND TRANSLATION

‘Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle was born to a Jewish family in 1874 in Kiev, where he graduated from the university in history and philosophy. Specialising in French and European history, he became a le...

Democracy, Development, and the International System

Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country and time effects and instrument for income. Results reveal that the effect of income varies across income levels and across eras. First, income has a decreasing marginal effect on democratization. In already developed (and democratized) countries, any extra growth has no further effect on the level of democracy. Second, the structure of the international system affects the resources and strategies of pro-authoritarian and pro-democratic factions in client states. The proportion of liberal democracies peaks under international orders governed by democratic hegemons, such as the post–Cold War period, and bottoms out when authoritarian great powers such as the Holy Alliance control the world system.

Winning the Battle by Losing the War: The Lautsi Case and the Holy Alliance between American Conservative Evangelicals, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican to Reshape European Identity

The compulsory display of crucifixes in Italian public schools does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The victory before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the Lautsi judgment of a variegated coalition of actors ranging from the strong alliance between the Vatican and the Italian Government to the Russia of the New Orthodoxy as well as to American Conservative Evangelicals, promises to change our understanding of church-state relationship in Europe and signals the emergence of a ‘new ecumenism’ in which the religious groups of different traditions work together toward common political goals. But was this judgment a real success for the Holy Alliance that successfully overturned the first Lautsi decision? I will argue that the March 2011 decision may result in a pyrrhic victory. The continuous reliance on State support to defend majority religious privileges may endanger, rather than benefit, religious vitality.

Alexandre Ier, Napoléon et les relations franco-russes

Educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment, upon his accession to the throne in March 1801, Alexander I, intending to reform his empire, gave priority to domestic issues; but very quickly, foreign policy came to dominate the agenda, and his duel with Napoleon wholly absorbed his energies. Because of the ambivalence of the Tilsit alliance, Russian-French relations continuously deteriorated after 1807, leading to the 1812 tragedy. Vanquisher of Napoleon, the tsar who has been transformed by the ordeal (he became religious), became anxious to rebuild the European continent on a new basis. This explains the personal role he played during the Vienna Congress and the project of Holy Alliance that he encouraged. But by 1820-21, Alexander became more and more paranoiac in his political views and the Holy Alliance has been transformed into a tool to repress liberal ideas in the service of conservative regimes.

England's political/institutional influences on Neapolitan constitutionalism, 1820–21

SUMMARY This article examines England's political/institutional influences on the rise and development of Neapolitan constitutionalism and the attitude taken by the English government toward the Neapolitan constitutional experiment in 1820–21. The Neapolitan Constitution of 1820 was lifted almost entirely from Spain's Cadiz Constitution of 1812. It called for a single-chamber system: a national assembly elected by three-degree universal suffrage, endowed with broad legislative powers only weakly checked by the sovereign. It was a model quite different from the British one, but the central role that the Parliament assumed during this constitutional experiment (it had to supervise both the political and administrative life of the Neapolitans, and to give them justice for the wrongs they had suffered) represented an important point of contact with British political customs. The Neapolitan Constitution was also a reaction against the centralist state that the Bourbon Restoration had inherited from the Napoleonic era. In this sense, England's self-government model was more present among the Neapolitans' desiderata than they themselves even knew. English public opinion was in favour of the Neapolitan Revolution, and the Neapolitans believed that there was a precise link between the enthusiasm with which British public opinion had welcomed the revolution and the political conduct of its government. That was not the case: the attitude of the English government was characterized right from the start by considerable ambiguity. It adopted an ambiguous policy of neutrality and offered no help to the Neapolitan revolutionaries in the difficult time when they were fighting the Holy Alliance's armies.

Opposites Reconciled: Ramiro, Conde de Lucena (1823) and the Liberal Trienio

It often requires some adjustment for the modern reader of historical novels to grasp what motivated authors of past examples of that genre. The first three historical novels in Spanish literature spring from motives that clearly distinguish each work by something more significant than their dates of publication or the Romantic nature of their content. In an attempt to describe these respective unique qualities, I should like to set out first what I believe is an insufficiently observed feature of Rafael Humara y Salamanca's Ramiro, conde de Lucena and its context in 1823. The date of its publication coincided with the year in which an invading French army, sponsored by the Holy Alliance, restored Fernando VII to absolutist authority. The novel, however, had been written during the chaotic three years in which the king was forced to rule as a constitutional monarch. Those three years, 1820-23, often called Trienio liberal or constitucional, began with the declaration of revolt by Colonel--later General--Rafael de Riego in Cadiz. He brought into focus the resentment of troops who had not been paid regularly by the central government and who now refused to embark to fight against the revolutions in Spain's American colonies. Riego, imbued with liberal and Masonic ideas, sought to restore the Constitution of 1812 and thus end the absolutist reign of Fernando. In the ensuing months, Spain's central authority broke down, and government was sometimes conducted by regional juntas. Fernando, supported by traditional royalists and the most conservative elements, schemed to defeat his opponents. These included the exaltados or extremist advocates of liberalism, and the moderates who sought an abridgment of absolutism, but under a constitution modified from that of 1812. Opposition also arose from Masons, as well as from men of letters and public affairs whom the King had exiled after his return to the throne in 1814, but who were now able to return under the more generous terms of the restored 1812 laws. Political groups fell into the morass of petty rivalries, and scrambled to seek their own advantage in guiding the country (Fehrenbach). The national treasury was in effect bankrupt, and provincial authorities were not sending on their tax revenues to the Madrid government. Anti-clericalism increased markedly, and violence against monastic foundations expressed long-held anger against the privileged establishment (Callahan 131-35). In addition, there were riots in the streets of larger cities. Republican sentiments were more openly proclaimed, and throughout, Fernando tried to play one faction against another, and succeeded only in setting all but the most ardent royalists against him. In writing his novel, Humara seems to have looked back to a more remote past, in which the dust of warfare had long since settled and the invective, been silenced. He believed that the main figures of those times might offer an acceptable example of maintaining the country to his troubled contemporaries. The period on which Humara fastened his gaze was the siege of Sevilla undertaken by Fernando III in 1247, and what the novelist adds to the material in the chronicles is the reconciliation of opposing parties. The distinctive nature of the work emerges sharply at the very end of the novel when Ali-Rosai, the defeated but dignified Granadine general, comes by the Seville cemetery where his valiant foe, Ramiro, lies buried. After Vargas, a brave Christian general who was himself a rival and critic of Ramiro, has escorted him to the grave site, the Moor exclaims in the concluding lines of the book: Quedad en paz, exclamo, sagrados, manes que el destino persiguio en la vida, pero que la virtud ba coronado en la muerte. Proteged la carreta de mis dias, y preservadme del tumulto desenfrenado de las pasiones y de los negros afectos del aborrecimiento. Adios, noble sombra de Ramiro; tu sabes cuanto te admire en la tierra, y que esfuerzo de amistad desplegue para perdonarte el haber subyugado a mi patria. …

EUGENE J. KISLUK. Brothers from the North: The Polish Democratic Society and the European Revolutions of 1848-1849. (East European Monographs, number 665.) Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs. 2005. Pp. vi, 272. $40.00

This is a detailed history of the Polish Democratic Society (of left-wing exiled Polish nationalists in Paris) during the European Revolutions of 1848–1849. As might be expected, the story includes chapters about years of interminable waiting (from 1832, the date of the society's founding, to 1848); days of hope (February–March 1848, in Paris); much internecine squabbling (both in Paris and back in partitioned Poland); and, ultimately, disappointment and, for some, further exile westward, into England. It is, in sum, a rather dispiriting tale, not least because a nation partitioned among the three most conservative (Holy Alliance) great European powers had to hope for a European war to change the status quo and allow the possibility of reunification into a single state. While the French may have been sympathetic to the plight of the Poles, neither left nor right was interested in a European war. However, the dedication of a few thousand individuals to “Our Freedom and Yours,” as the famous slogan first proclaimed in 1831, kept alive the idea of a nation-state and the resistance for which Poles had already become and would continue to be known.

The Resurgence of Radical Populism in Latin America

A specter is haunting Latin America: radical populism. Former presidents such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and respectable media analysts have cautioned us about the dangers of charismatic and plebiscitary domination for democracy. They have warned us of the risks of irresponsible economic policies. A holy alliance is trying to exorcize the ghost of populism that periodically reappears even though its death has been constantly announced and predicted. 1 In contrast to the apocalyptic warnings of the media analysts and politicians we have an accumulated knowledge of populism that can help us arrive to more nuanced conclusions about its relationships to democracy. Over the last three decades we have seen a renaissance of studies. If previous scholarship based on modernization and dependency theories tied populism to specific economic and social forces, 2 this new wave of research has uncoupled politics from what were understood as deeper structural determinants. Scholars have shown that populism is not necessarily linked to the transition to modernity or to import-substitution industrialization. The unexpected affinities between populism and neoliberalism stimulated research on the politics of structural adjustment under neo-populist leadership. 3 More recently, the nationalist and

André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth-Century France. By Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 192 pp. HB £65.00 ISBN 0–197–14402–0

To appreciate this outstanding work of scholarship by Alastair Hamilton, Professor of the History of Ideas at Leiden University, and Francis Richard, former Keeper of Persian manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, one needs to place it in its proper context by mentioning a few historical landmarks. In the times of Charles V (1500–58), church bells rang in German towns to remind people of the Turkish menace. Dread of the Ottoman Turks did not disappear completely even after 1571, when their navy was crushed at the battle of Lepanto by the Holy Alliance of Spain, Venice, and the Papacy. Such a defeat did not necessarily lead to a decisive shift in the balance of sea power, since the Turks retained Cyprus, forced the withdrawal of Venice from the Alliance in 1573, and conquered Tunis in 1574. More significant was the repulse of the Ottomans from Vienna in 1683 by...

Thinking the Mediterranean Arena Today

SummaryIn the name of a historical realism that implies a philosophy of history yet to be validated, should we assume that any attempt to explore or reactivate the question of meaning, which is so alive in the Mediterranean arena, is doomed to capsize among spiritualist imaginings, idealistic speculation, nostalgic reminiscences? Or, despite the triumphant march of a globalization bereft of a humanistic project, can we identify, in the Mediterranean history of thought and culture, stances of reason, objectives from the mind, works of creative imagination, the words of civilizing prophets, saints, thinkers, artists, heroes that might fertilize, illuminate, inspire, provide some additional soul for the new struggles to emancipate the human condition, such as they are borne in urgently on all the citizens of a world that is chained to the same destiny?

The Specter of Collegiality

A specter is haunting academe: the specter of collegiality. Everybody knows what it is not. Nobody knows what it is. So no powers young or old, faculty or administrative have entered into any sort of holy alliance in order to exorcize the specter. Perhaps in fact, some would maintain, it should not be exorcized. Instead, it ought to be made more manifest than it is, and more actively promoted or pursued. But how? Exactly why? And in either case, or in any case, in whose interests?

Byron's "Don Juan" as a Global Allegory

THE DEDICATION IS ONE OF THE MOST CITED PASSAGES IN DON JUAN, YET literary critics have not fully explored its implications for the nature of Byron's social satire. It is used as evidence for Byron's disagreement with a poet like Wordsworth over aesthetic issues, or for a contrast between Byron's republican ideals and Wordsworth's growing conservatism. The Dedication, then, is treated as literary and political criticism, but what is overlooked is its specifically economic content. For Byron, Robert Southey and Wordsworth are sellouts in the first sense--they have compromised themselves for money: I would not imitate the petty thought, Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice, For all the glory your conversion brought, Since gold alone should not have been its price. You [Southey] have your salary--was't for that you wrought? And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise. (1) Byron then departs from this critique of poets to make a larger attack upon British foreign policy, upon the 'intellectual eunuch Castlereagh and the Holy Alliance, the Conspiracy or congress to be made-- / Cobbling at manacles for all mankind-- / A tinkering slavemaker, who mends old chains, / With God and man's abhorrence for its gains (14). There is a movement from the micro-level of individual behavior, to the national level, to the international level--from Wordsworth's gold to Castlereagh's gains--and to explore this movement is to see the nature of Byron's critique of globalizing capitalism. Byron's uneasy relationship with the British economic empire is found as early as The Curse of Minerva. Although Minerva's narrator tries to fend off her curse by arguing that the plunderer of Greek ruins, Lord Elgin, was a Scot, she negates the distinction, responding that Elgin is a lawless son / ... do[ing] what oft Britannia's self had done (211-12). Elgin's sin is to turn sacred ruins into commerce. Long of their Patron's gusto let them tell, / Whose noblest, native gusto is--to sell: / To sell, and make, may Shame record the day, / The State receiver of his pilfer'd prey (171-74; author's emphasis). Hence, Minerva's analysis of the corruption of British society, and her retributive curse, is economic in nature; after a scathing critique of British imperialism, which includes the prediction of a nationalist rebellion in India, she turns to London: Now fare ye well, enjoy your little hour, Go grasp the shadow of your vanish'd power; Gloss o'er the failure of each fondest scheme, Your strength a name, your bloated wealth a dream: Gone is that Gold, the marvel of mankind, And Pirates barter all that's left behind. No more the hirelings, purchas'd near and far, Crowd to the ranks of mercenary war. The idle merchant on the useless quay, Droops o'er the bales no bark may bear away; Or back returning sees rejected stores Rot piecemeal on his own encumber'd shores: The starv'd mechanic breaks his rusting loom, And desperate roans him 'gainst the common doom. Then in the Senate of your sinking state, Show me the man whose counsels may have weight. Vain is each voice where tones could once command, E'en factions cease to charm a factious land; Yet jarring sects convulse a sister isle, And light with maddening hands the mutual pile. (259-78) In this passage we have the exact reverse of the direction that Byron's critique of society is usually assumed to take. Malcolm Kelsall briefly observes that passages in Don Juan such as 8.125, with its demotic tone that suggests aristocrats ... grow great by war, and the people starve, might be 'constructively' read with an internationalist and Marxist message. (2) Yet Kelsall does not pursue this theoretical perspective on the poem, arguing instead that the political ennui in Byron's poetry came from a man who had outlived his time: with the Whig discourse of liberation (born with the Glorious Revolution) co-opted by the Tories, who now portrayed their own party as defending Europe from the tyranny of Napoleon, Byron was backed into a corner. …